Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley Is in Trouble — Updated: Sequoia Capital, arguably the smartest venture capital investor in business, is sounding the alarm and asking its portfolio companies to buckle down for what could be the worst economic downturn of their relatively short lives.

‘Brick’ MacBook Pro leaked in up-close spy shot? — Since we heard those “Brick” rumors the other day, the mill has been all but silent... until now. It's hard to tell exactly what we're looking at here, but damned if this doesn't look like some fancy new MacBook Pro carved out of a single piece of metal …

More ‘Brick’ MacBook Case Images? — An Apple.Pro blog has posted three small images of what appear to be a new MacBook case. The casing resembles the MacBook Pro case image leaked earlier today, but clearly represents a smaller screened laptop. Absent are the speaker grills of the earlier image.

Google's Super Satellite Captures First Image — This bird's-eye view of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first image ever seen by the GeoEye-1, the world's highest-resolution commercial satellite sponsored by Google, when it opened its camera door earlier this week.

Yahoo Closes At $13.76. What A Train Wreck. — I guess the upside is that a stock can't fall below zero, so there's an end in sight to the ongoing destruction of jobs and shareholder wealth at Yahoo. The stock closed at $13.76 today, down another 5.6%. And this isn't just part …

Introducing Yahoo! Web Analytics — Have you ever bailed on an online checkout because something in the user experience bugged you? Or were pleasantly surprised that the sponsored listings were more relevant than the regular results of your web search? This week, we are rolling …

eBay founder factchecks John McCain — Pierre Omidyar, the one-and-only founder of eBay, didn't much appreciate John McCain's tip of the hat in last night's debate to Meg Whitman, eBay's former CEO. “Meg Whitman was CEO of a company which started with 12 people,” McCain said, which rather riled Omidyar.

User Account Control — We promised that this blog would provide a view of Engineering Windows 7 and that means that we would cover the full range of topics—from performance to user interface, technical and non-technical topics, and of course easy topics and controversial topics.

“TRIBES”: TEN QUESTIONS FOR SETH GODIN — 10 Questions For Seth Godin … 1. For the benefit of gapingvoid readers not yet familiar with your work [all 14 of them], let's get the main schpiel over and done with: From your perspective, what is “Tribes” about?

Air Force Will Fight Online, Without Cyber Command — The Air Force is going ahead with plans to put together a force that will wage wars online. But it won't be a full-fledged Cyber Command. — In August, the Air Force put its controversial effort to put together a “Cyber Command” …

Apple patents OS X Dock — Do you hear war drums? — Apple has patented the OS X Dock, nearly a decade after the operating system made its public debut with a new slant on the taskbar. — The late arrival isn't due to a lack of initiative, however. Apple applied for the patent December 20 …

Email Archiving Made Simple — More and more we hear from businesses that managing email storage and retention is expensive and complicated. Regulations and guidelines like the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure put pressure on IT organizations to ensure that email is properly retained …

How botnets use ‘bullet-proof’ domains — Botnets are proving to more resilient and harder to shut down. — That's largely due to an increased use of methods people use to obscure the domain by constantly mapping to different bots within the network, according to a recently released study (PDF).

YouTube adds “Read Comment Aloud” feature from xkcd — A couple weeks ago, xkcd ran this funny comic: — Randall Monroe, the creator of xkcd, suggested that if YouTube commenters had to listen to their comments read back to them aloud, it might lead to better discussion on YouTube.

Google Confirms RSS For Web Search Results — Google has confirmed for Search Engine Land that they'll soon start offering RSS feeds for web search results. When it happens, the RSS feeds will be an extension of Google Alerts, which currently only allow notification by email.

DARPA to begin mysterious ‘Project GANDALF’ — ‘And with you come evils worse than before’ — The renowned US military ultratech agency, DARPA*, is about to begin work on a mysterious new piece of surveillance and tracking kit known only as “Project Gandalf”.